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by Jackson, Julian

  Mitterrand’s Memories

  In short, the line between nuance and apologetics is delicate. When does forgetting become whitewashing, when does reconciliation become rehabilitation? How difficult it has become to construct a consensual interpretation of the French past was demonstrated in the controversy aroused by the publication in 1994 of a book by the journalist Pierre Péan on the Vichyite past of François Mitterrand. The book’s cover showed Mitterrand participating in a right-wing demonstration during the 1930s. The story of Mitterrand’s past had been told before, but Péan provided an unprecedented wealth of documentation thanks to the co-operation of Mitterrand himself. Mitterrand then allowed himself to be interviewed on television for ninety minutes in September 1994 to appease the uproar excited by Péan’s book. This willingness to come clean on his past represented a change of attitude by Mitterrand. In 1969, he had written of his wartime experience: ‘Back in France [from the prisoner of war camp] I became a resister after no great agonising.’ To say the least, this missed out a lot in between. It was not, however, a direct lie, unlike Mitterrand’s claim in the 1970s that he had been an ardent supporter of the Popular Front.57

  Mitterrand’s motive in speaking about his past was possibly a pre-emptive strike against future historians as he approached the end of his life. But he also seems to have seen himself as engaged in a wider pedagogic enterprise of reconciling the French people with their past.58 In a series of interviews with the historian Olivier Wieviorka in the early 1990s, Mitterrand expressed his distaste for continuing the trials of former servants of Vichy: ‘one cannot live the whole time on rancour and memories’.59 It emerged that Mitterrand had intervened to slow down the preparation of the case against Papon. Péan’s most shocking revelation was that Mitterrand had enjoyed friendly relations with René Bousquet into the 1980s. All this came on top of the revelation in 1992 that since 1987 Mitterrand had had a wreath placed on the tomb of Marshal Pétain on each anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. Although the Élysée made clear that this was a homage to the victor of Verdun not the Vichy leader, the news caused outrage.

  Mitterrand’s response to his critics was to argue implicitly that the past should be embraced in all its complexity. He seemed to be trying to reclaim a place for ambiguous trajectories like his own which had been squeezed out by the vast condescension of Gaullist history.60 Now that the Gaullist myth was shattered, Mitterrand was suggesting that the alternative was not to assert that the French had all been traitors, but that they had struggled for solutions in a difficult period. For any historian, the most striking feature of Mitterrand’s journey from Pétainism to Resistance is its very ordinariness. In his television interview, Mitterrand made a revealing mistake when asked about the Jewish Statute. He claimed that it was a piece of legislation against foreign Jews about which he had known nothing. That he had known nothing about it seems implausible; that it was directed only against foreign Jews was wrong; and even if it had been, this hardly made it more defensible. The error, odd for someone as steeped in history as Mitterrand, seemed to confirm that he still unconsciously held certain prejudices of the period, distinguishing between French and foreign Jews, and somehow hoping that this distinction would cast Vichy in a more favourable light. As Tony Judt observes, ‘he cannot condemn the past root and branch, because he would be condemning himself’.61

  Even Mitterrand’s own supporters found these revelations difficult to accept. The Socialist Lionel Jospin commented that ‘one would have liked a clearer and simpler itinerary’. And yet Jospin need only have remembered his own family history to see that simple itineraries were not so common. Jospin’s father had been a Socialist supporter of Paul Faure. He accepted municipal responsibilities under the Occupation and was temporarily excluded from the Socialist Party in 1945.

  Twice in his television interview Mitterrand said he wished to end France’s ‘eternal civil wars’. In the end, his attempts to reconcile the French with their past backfired badly, but this was due partly to the contradictions of his own position. When in 1992 the Vel d’Hiver 1942 Committee had tried to obtain an official apology for the role played by Vichy in the extermination of the Jews, Mitterrand refused on the grounds that it was not for the French Republic to apologize for the crimes of Vichy: ‘the Resistance, then the government of de Gaulle, then the IVth Republic and the others have been founded on the denial of this “French State”’.62 Attending the ceremony of remembrance for the Vel d’Hiver on 16 July 1992—the first time a French President had done so—Mitterrand was booed by many of those present. Defending his position subsequently, Mitterrand again refused to link what had happened in the Occupation with the rest of French history. He might, he said, have made an official gesture of repentance, like Willy Brandt in Germany, ‘if the French nation had been implicated [engagé] in this sad business’, but this had not been the case. Even when Mitterrand conceded some ground in the next year with the decision that 16 July was to become a national day of mourning for the Jews, the announcement of this decision was accompanied by the reminder that the anti-Semitic persecutions had been carried out ‘under the de facto authority called the “government of the French State”’.63

  The paradox was that in refusing in 1992 to accept official responsibility for the French role in the Holocaust, Mitterrand was hiding behind the Gaullist fiction, officially adumbrated in the ordinance of August 1944, that true legitimacy between 1940 and 1944 lay with a French Republic which had never ceased to exist. How did this square with his attempt, in 1994, to rescue Vichy from total obloquy? Perhaps the greatest paradox of all was that the gesture Mitterrand, a lifelong anti-Gaullist, refused to make in 1992 out of fidelity to the Gaullist reading of history, was made on 16 July 1995, by Jacques Chirac, the new Gaullist president. Chirac became the first French leader formally to accept responsibility for France’s part in the Holocaust: ‘the criminal madness of the occupier was supported by the French people and by the French State … France on that day committed an irreparable act … It is undeniable that this was a collective fault.’ Apart from expressions of outrage by a few die-hard Gaullists— two of them wrote an article in Le Monde entitled ‘No, Vichy was not France’—it was striking that Chirac’s words seemed to meet with general approval.64 Did this mean that the French had at last reached a consensus about the Occupation? Two years after Chirac’s speech of contrition, it became clear that this was far from the case. The trial of Maurice Papon for crimes against humanity in October 1997 caused France’s obsession with Vichy to reach a new paroxysm of intensity.

  The Papon Trial

  Maurice Papon had been the secretary-general of the Gironde prefecture from May 1942 until the Liberation. During this time over 1,500 Jews had been deported from the Bordeaux region, in ten convoys, the last of them in May 1944. Papon was allegedly implicated in eight of these operations, and the civil plaintiffs in the trial represented seventy-two of the victims. What made this trial more controversial than Touvier’s was that, unlike Touvier, Papon was no right-wing fanatic. He had been an ambitious young functionary who had owed his rapid promotion before the war to the patronage of Radical-Socialist politicians. In this respect he was similar to René Bousquet, except that despite being only one year younger, he held a much more junior position. In fact, Papon would possibly never have been tried at all if either Bousquet or Leguay had still been alive: his trial acted as a kind of proxy for theirs. In some respects this made the Papon trial unsatisfactory—Bousquet had given the orders, Papon had only obeyed them—but it also gave it greater symbolic resonance: Bousquet’s trial would have been that of the Vichy regime while Papon’s was that of Vichy France. The trial sparked off an orgy of collective repentance for France’s guilt in the Holocaust. For the first time, the Catholic Church performed a public mea culpa; so too did the official spokesmen of the French medical profession. More than ever, Vichy also seemed to haunt the imagination of contemporary French novelists.65

  Before the trial commenced, th
e general public had few doubts about Papon’s guilt. The trial lasted six months, longer than any other in French legal history. In the end, on 2 April 1998, Papon was convicted of complicity in crimes against humanity and sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment. But by the time this verdict was delivered, the certainties with which the trial opened had dissipated. This was partly the result of the many incidents that punctuated the proceedings. Early on there was outrage when the judge agreed that on account of his ill health Papon need not remain in detention during his trial. The civil plaintiffs pointed out that Papon’s victims had not enjoyed such privileged treatment. Much time was spent discussing Papon’s responsibility for the death of possibly several hundred Algerians in 1961 when as Prefect of Police he banned a demonstration about the Algerian war in Paris. This was clearly a distraction from the real purpose of the trial. Further confusion was caused when the historian Michel Bergès, who had first discovered the documents which led to Papon’s prosecution, now made it clear that he was no longer convinced of Papon’s guilt. There was also much disagreement among the civil parties as to the degree of Papon’s guilt, and the most suitable punishment for it. Arno Klarsfeld annoyed many of his colleagues by demanding a relatively light sentence against Papon on the grounds that, although clearly guilty, he was no Touvier or Barbie.

  These incidents and complications added to the daily drama of the proceedings, but the fundamental problem with the trial was fitting Papon’s case to a definition of crimes against humanity which had originally been designed, in Nancy Wood’s words, ‘to catch other and bigger fish’.66 Papon had been a relatively junior Vichy official obeying orders. To establish that he was complicit in the bid for ideological hegemony by an Axis power—as was required by the 1994 definition of crimes against humanity—it had to be demonstrated that he had had knowledge of the fate awaiting the deportees, and that the constraints on a functionary of his rank did not preclude some freedom of action. Both issues were matters of fine judgement, and difficult to prove. A number of historians, including Robert Paxton and Marc-Olivier Baruch—author of a book on the Vichy administration—testified for the prosecution. One historian, Henri Amouroux, testified for the defence. Henry Rousso refused to testify at all on the grounds that the kinds of truth which historians sought to establish were different from the kinds of truth required by courts of law. Establishing what Papon or anyone else ‘knew’ about the Holocaust, and what exactly was meant by ‘knowing’ in such a case, proved almost impossible.

  The case against Papon was further muddied by the fact that he had used his position in the Vichy administration to help the Resistance, although it was not clear how early this help had started or what the motivation behind it had been. When Papon had first been accused of crimes against humanity in 1981, a special panel of resisters considered his case and decided that his Resistance credentials were valid, although it also concluded that he should have resigned his post in June 1942. Papon’s alleged services to the Resistance had led de Gaulle to appoint him prefect of the Gironde immediately after the Liberation. Papon’s glittering career owed as much to de Gaulle as to Vichy.

  A number of distinguished former resisters, including Claude Serreulles, now 85 years old, testified at the trial in Papon’s favour. But when it came to establishing what Papon might have known about the fate of the Jewish deportees, these former resisters were thrown on to the defensive, finding themselves almost required to apologize for their own belated discovery of the Holocaust. It emerged implicitly from such testimonies that the fate of the Jews had not been an issue of paramount importance for the Resistance. The problem which no one seemed ready to recognize was that whether or not Papon had been, in part at least, a resister was irrelevant to the question whether or not he was guilty of crimes against humanity. In theory, at least, the two facts were not incompatible.67 Although no-one formulated the issue quite so starkly, many of the resisters who testified were angry that the value of their testimony was not in itself enough to resolve the case. The 88-year-old Jean Jaudel, himself Jewish, and one of the few members of the Musée de l’homme Resistance group to have survived the war, denounced the way in which Papon’s trial was turning into a ‘trial of the Resistance and of Gaullism’.68 The writer Maurice Druon, former member of the Free French, denounced the ‘insult to the memory’ of those resisters who had testified to Papon’s Resistance credentials. He worried about the implications of the trial: ‘at the Liberation, we made sure that the same aura of heroism surrounded all those who had suffered in the war: the hostages, the deported resisters, the Jewish resisters. Now today we seem to want to create a separate category [ie. the Jews].’69

  The Resistance Syndrome

  To say that the trial of Papon had become the trial of the Resistance was an exaggeration, but the fact that former resisters could interpret it like this revealed how defensive they had become in the years since the myth of the Resistance had lost its hold on the French imagination. What place was there for the Resistance in an account of France’s past which seemed only to dwell on the blackest moments? Had France forgotten her debt of gratitude to the Resistance?

  The relationship between the Resistance and the mass of the population had never been an untroubled one, either during the war or after it. The myth of a nation of resisters flattered the national psyche, but implicitly downgraded the special status of the Resistance. Once that myth had vanished, the Resistance could reclaim its place as an elite standing above the ambient mediocrity, but at the same time, instead of being a source of collective pride, it risked being viewed as irritatingly judgemental and censorious. The Resistance’s claim to moral ascendancy sometimes verged on complacent self-satisfaction or even a kind of moral tyranny. When Jean-Melville made his film of Silence de la mer in 1949 he had agreed to show the finished product to a jury of resisters, chosen by Vercors, and burn the negative if their verdict was unfavourable.70 Many ordinary French people probably had sneaking sympathy for Georges Pompidou’s remarks to an American journalist about the cult of resistance heroes: ‘ “I hate all that business”, he said with a quick wave of his hand and sharp displeasure in his bright eyes, “I hate medals, I hate decorations of all kinds”.’71 This was the kind of irritation that veterans of the Great War had often aroused in the younger generations after 1918. But at least the veterans had represented most of the population. Unlike the monuments to the fallen of the Great War, many monuments to the Resistance are not in the centre of communities, but outside them. This is a striking spatial representation of the relationship between the Resistance and the population.72

  It was not surprising, therefore, that the dissipation of the Gaullist myth led not to a positive re-evaluation of the Resistance, but to an erosion of its place in the popular imagination. There seemed no place for heroes any longer. The Resistance disappeared from the cinema. As Michel Foucault wrote in 1974: ‘is it possible at the moment to make a positive film on the struggles of the Resistance? One suspects not. One has the impression that people would laugh or that, quite simply, the film would not be seen.’73 Absent from the cinema in the 1970s, the Resistance became a subject of mockery in it during the 1980s. One of the cinematic successes of the decade was Papy fait de la résistance (1983), the story of a family of musicians who refuse to play while the Germans are in France. The film satirized every cliché of Resistance mythology, reworking scenes from classic resistance films like The Silence of the Sea or The Army of Shadows. But its most subversive moment was the end where the film that has just been seen turns out to have been screened for Les Dossiers de l’Écran, a famous French television series in which a film is used to form the basis of studio debate. In this case the debate is between the resisters who had been depicted in the film and are now shown, thirty years afterwards, as faintly ridiculous figures still quarrelling bitterly about their past, but indignant that anyone else should question it. Thus the film mocks not only the alleged exploits of the resisters, but their claim to be the moral custodia
ns of memory and their own history.74 No less iconoclastic was the cynical Un héros très discret (1996) describing how a young man invents for himself an entirely fictitious Resistance past after 1945.

  In the face of such attitudes, resisters held on to the idea of themselves as a moral elite. As one of them put it: ‘when one meets someone who was a resister, whatever he is doing today, one has the feeling of being part of the same family’.75 At the Barbie trial one resister declared: ‘no schism in the French Resistance will take place here; it is an indissoluble monolith which nothing can destroy’.76 Such a strategy to defend the memory of the Resistance was undermined during the 1970s as more evidence emerged, much of it from within the Resistance community itself, of the conflicts which had run through the history of the Resistance. The memoirs of Frenay and Bourdet recalled the tensions between de Gaulle and the Resistance. This running sore in the memory of the Resistance was also exploited by François Mitterrand, during the period of his political career when he was saying more about his Resistance past than his Vichy one. In 1969, Mitterrand wrote that de Gaulle had ‘confiscated the Resistance’s capital of sacrifice, suffering and dignity’.77

  The many foreigners who had participated in the Resistance through the FTP-MOI might have felt, on the other hand, that the entire French Resistance had confiscated their ‘capital of sacrifice’. This was another buried memory to resurface in the 1980s. In 1965–6, when the film-maker Armand Gatti produced a scenario on the Manouchian group, his ten successive versions were rejected by production companies because, he was told, ‘a film in which there are only foreigners cannot give us an image of the French Resistance’.78 When in 1970 the PCF produced a new edition of Lettres des fusillés, its collection of letters by Communists who had been shot during the war, the name of Manouchian reappeared, but his Christian name was Gallicized from Misak to Michel. A film was eventually made on Manouchian in 1976—the low-budget production Affiche rouge—but the role of foreigners in the Resistance remained a largely unknown story until the screening on television in 1985 of the film Des terroristes à la retraite. The film, which suggested that Manouchian had been betrayed by the Communist Party, gave rise to violent polemics in the press. In the long run this had the beneficial effect of bringing the role of foreigners out of the obscurity into which it had fallen—the next edition of the Lettres des fusillés restored all the names which had been there in 1946 and there is now a square in Paris named after Marcel Rayman, one of the members of the Manouchian group79—but its immediate effect was to cause a feeling that the Resistance, especially the Communist Resistance, had skeletons to hide.